The Kill Zone

by David Hagberg

  The two officers in the van at the foot of the driveway had the windows down. They looked cold but very alert. Yemm gave them a curt nod, then hustled McGarvey up the walk to the house.

  Peggy Vaccaro let them in. She wasn’t smiling. She looked determined and a little frightened. A bruise was forming on the side of her face. The house was quiet. “Mrs. M. has finally settled down.”

  “Where is she?” McGarvey asked.

  “Upstairs in her bedroom. Janis is with her.” She helped McGarvey off with his coat.

  “Dr. Stenzel hasn’t been here yet?”

  “Not yet,” the security officer said. She seemed to be on the verge of collapse. She looked exhausted.

  McGarvey glanced toward the head of the stairs. The Russian Typhoon clock had stopped. He supposed he hadn’t wound it, but he couldn’t remember.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Yemm had cocked his head to listen to something, and he stared at the alarm system keypad on the wall next to the closet door. The lights were out.

  “She started making phone calls as soon as you left,” Peggy Vaccaro said. “She was working on some fund-raising event, because she told us that the best time to catch them with their checkbooks open was on Sunday mornings, when they were still home in their pajamas.”

  “Did she come downstairs?”

  Peggy shook her head. “She never left the bedroom. We brought her some coffee, and Janis and I took turns out in the hall by her door until she lost it.”

  Janis Westlake came to the head of the stairs. She looked distraught. “She’s okay now, Mr. Director,” she called down softly.

  “It just happened? Out of the blue?” McGarvey asked. His gut was jumping all over the place. He didn’t know where to land. “One minute she was raising money and the next she was hanging from the rafters?”

  “She got one phone call—”

  “From who?”

  “I don’t know,” Peggy said.

  “Check it out,” McGarvey told Yemm. “Then what?” he asked the girl.

  Peggy looked down, girding herself. “She made another call. It must have been Denver General, because she asked for room five-seventeen.” Peggy looked up. “She was too fast for us.”

  McGarvey’s heart was ripped in two. He resisted the urge to shove Peggy aside and race up the stairs. He needed more.

  Peggy touched his sleeve, her face twisted in an expression of anguish and pity. “She lost it. She started throwing things around. Breaking stuff. By the time both of us got in there, she was trying to bust out one of the Lexan windows with a chair. The big chair in the bedroom. The chaise longue. She was using it like a battering ram.” Peggy shook her head in amazement. “Janis and I had a hard enough time getting it away from her and putting it down, it was so heavy. But she was swinging it around like a toy.” She glanced at Yemm, who had stepped aside and was speaking softly over his headset. “Then she started screaming at us. Swearing. Calling us all sorts of names.”

  “Like what?” McGarvey asked.

  Peggy was embarrassed. “Motherfucking lesbian dykes. Nonsense like that.” She passed a hand across her eyes. “It stopped as fast as it started. One minute she was wigging out, and the next minute she was sitting on the floor crying her eyes out. That’s when we called your office.”

  “And then you called Dr. Stenzel?”

  Peggy shook her head. “No. He called us and said that he was on his way.”

  “The phone call originated here in the Washington area,” Yemm said. “But it was a block-trace. Possibly a cell phone.”

  “No way of pinning it down closer than that?”

  Yemm shook his head. “It could have been from anyone. And anywhere, if they used a remailer.”

  “The Russian embassy?”

  “It’s possible,” Yemm said.

  Peggy paid close attention to the exchange. “Is there something going on here that we should know about, Mr. Director?”

  “I don’t know,” McGarvey said. “Maybe. But my wife will probably be hospitalized this afternoon, so your operation will move to Bethesda. And afterward probably to Cropley.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  McGarvey went upstairs, gave Janis a pat on the shoulder, then went back to the master bedroom overlooking the fifteenth fairway.

  Kathleen stood at the window, her arms clasped across her chest as if she were cold. The room was a shambles. The night lamps were broken into pieces, the lampshades battered out of shape. The bedcovers and sheets had been pulled off and tossed aside. Drawers were lying amidst piles of clothing. Her closet mirror was smashed, some of her clothes and shoes pulled out and scattered. Pictures had been snatched from the walls and destroyed. The curtains had been pulled from the windows. And the heavy chaise lounge was shoved up against the bed.

  McGarvey couldn’t assimilate what he was seeing. He had stepped into an alien world, a place that bore no relationship to his wife and their home. This wasn’t Kathleen’s doing. Not this.

  The scratching, nagging was back. The waterfall hurling itself down a million feet to crash madly on the jagged rocks drowned out rational thought.

  “Katy,” he said softly.

  Her back was to him. She didn’t turn around, but her shoulders stiffened a little. “That’s it,” she said in a perfectly normal voice. “They’ve finally beat us.”

  McGarvey went to her, and she looked up into his face.

  “Elizabeth won’t want to have children now. Not after this,” she said. She shrugged. “So, they win.”

  McGarvey felt as if he was looking into the eyes of a total stranger. “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know, Kirk. But you’ll have to stop them, you know. They’ll never give up until we’re all dead. Elizabeth, Todd, Otto, you, me.” She spoke in a conversational tone of voice; very matter-of-fact, as if she were discussing the weather or what’s for supper. The effect was chilling.

  It wasn’t that he was looking into the eyes of a stranger, he suddenly thought. He was seeing nothing there. No one was at home. Katy’s emotions were gone, disappeared, or whatever. Burned out.

  “We have to stop them for good this time,” she said. “Because I don’t think that I can stand much more.”

  “We will,” McGarvey said, holding her. She was shivering. There was a little blood on the side of her neck, where she had cut herself with flying glass or something. Her hair was mussed up, and her makeup was smeared. “How did you know about the accident?”

  “Oh, Otto called. He didn’t want me to worry.”

  It was another blow. McGarvey wasn’t surprised that Otto knew, only that he had called to break the news to Kathleen. It was callous. Thoughtless, even for Otto. More than that, it was cruel.

  Someone came in downstairs. McGarvey heard the front door, then the murmur of conversation in the stairhall. He supposed that it was Dr. Stenzel. The future that had seemed so bright just a few weeks ago, was now dark and empty. Perhaps even meaningless.

  Dr. Stenzel knocked softly on the doorframe. Kathleen stiffened in McGarvey’s arms. She straightened up and stepped back.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. Her left eyebrow arched.

  “I’m going to give you a sedative, then take you to the hospital,” Stenzel told her as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to say.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  Stenzel surveyed the damage in the room. “Who did all of this?”

  Kathleen refused to look. “I received some bad news,” she said.

  “I know. But it’s not your fault.”

  “It’s someone’s fault.”

  “Yes, but not yours,” Stenzel said. He motioned for McGarvey to leave.

  “No,” Kathleen blurted, clutching her husband’s arm.

  “It’ll be just a couple of days, Katy,” McGarvey assured her. “You’re overloaded. You’re burning out. You can’t keep going like this. You have to get some rest.”

  “That’
s stupid,” she said. “I’m not a fucking invalid, or something.” She shot Stenzel a vicious look. “Strap me in some goddamn bed, shoot me full of shit. I can’t go through that, Kirk. Not that.” She was losing it again.

  McGarvey gathered her in his arms and held her tight. Stenzel opened an alcohol towelette and swabbed a spot on her bare arm above the elbow. He took a hypodermic syringe from a small case in his pocket.

  “Jesus Christ, don’t let them do this to me, Kirk!” she shouted. She tried to struggle away from him, but Stenzel quickly gave her the shot.

  “Goddammit,” she said.

  She continued to struggle for several seconds, but then she started to sag. She looked up into her husband’s face, her anger gone. “Fuck it,” she said. “Just fuck it.”

  MONDAY

  SEVEN

  WAS IT A MONSTER COMING AFTER THEM? IN THEIR MIDST? COMING TO SCRATCH AT KATY’S SANITY? COMING TO KILL THEM ALL?

  BETHESDA

  McGarvey spent a tense night with Kathleen at the hospital. Even through she was sedated, she had a troubled sleep. He went home long enough to grab a quick shower and change clothes, then got back to the hospital a few minutes after eight.

  Katy was still asleep. Peggy Vaccaro and Janis Westlake were on station in the hall along with a couple of men Yemm had brought over from Security. Dr. Stenzel was just coming out of her room.

  “How is she?” McGarvey asked.

  “She’s still sleeping, and I want to keep her groggy all day,” Stenzel said. He took McGarvey down the hall to the doctors’ lounge, where he got them coffee. The hospital was busy this morning.

  “What’s wrong with her?” McGarvey asked.

  “Well, she’s exhausted, for one, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Stenzel said. He was careful with his words. “She could have had a nervous breakdown. Her mind simply shut down. But I rather doubt that.”

  “Did they tell you what she did?”

  Stenzel nodded. “I’ve called Bob Love, a neurologist friend of mind, to look at her. The Company has used him from time to time. He’s about the best in the business. He said that he’d stop by around nine this morning. I expect he’ll order some pictures, probably a CAT scan, an MRI, an EEG, then some blood work and possibly a lumbar tap.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Physical causes first,” Stenzel said. “Maybe a lesion in her brain. Maybe imbalanced sugar in her spinal fluid, something going haywire with her blood chemistry.” He shook his head. “Maybe even temporal-lobe epilepsy. We’re not ruling anything out.”

  “Did they tell you everything she said and did?”

  Stenzel nodded. “Are there any drugs in the house?”

  “If you mean marijuana or speed and shit like that, no. We’re both pretty conservative people.”

  “Right,” Stenzel replied dryly. “Did you ever see the movie The Exorcist?”

  “What, do you think she’s possessed?” McGarvey asked. He wasn’t amused.

  “No. But I think your wife’s problem is in her head, not in her physical brain or in her blood. But we have to eliminate all the obvious things first, which Bob Love is going to do for us.”

  “Assuming it is in her head, then what?”

  Stenzel shrugged. “Then I give her some tests.”

  “Like the ones you gave Otto?”

  “More or less. We’ll try to find out what’s bothering her in a general way, then narrow it down step-by-step until we get to the specific problem or problems. Sorta like a jigsaw puzzle. We’re looking for the one piece that makes some kind of sense out of the rest.”

  “What’s your gut reaction?” McGarvey asked. “You talked to the doctors in San Juan, and you talked to her when we got back. Now this.”

  Stenzel frowned. “I don’t know. I mean someone is trying to kill her husband and now her daughter. Any woman would pitch a fit under the same circumstances,” he told McGarvey. “But it’d be just that. She’d raise holy hell and demand that the people she loved were pulled off the firing line right now. Nothing would stand in her way. You know, like the mama bear and her cubs. Threaten her babies and watch out.”

  “But that’s not what she’s done,” McGarvey said. He was tired, mentally as well as physically.

  “No. Which leads me to suspect that something else is going on.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry about your daughter. But from what I’m told she’ll mend.”

  “Physically,” McGarvey replied. Another stab of pain tore at his heart. Liz’s baby had been a girl.

  “This will pass, Mr. Director,” Stenzel said with sympathy. “Bob Love will check out your wife, and by this time tomorrow we’ll have a much better idea what we’re dealing with and we can go on from there.”

  McGarvey rose to go. “I can’t walk away from the CIA with this hanging over our heads.”

  Stenzel shook his head. “It wouldn’t do your wife any good if you did. Right now she needs stability. Change, any sort of change, would be bad for her.” He gave McGarvey a critical look. “Any idea who’s gunning for you and your family? Or why?”

  “A couple,” McGarvey said. “We’re working on it.”

  “Then go do your job and let me do mine. You can’t help your wife by staying here. She wouldn’t have any idea that you were in the room even if you were holding her hand.”

  McGarvey knew better. “Take care of her, Doctor.”

  “Count on it.”

  CIA HEADQUARTERS

  The full Monday work shift had already arrived when McGarvey got back to the CIA. Thankfully the media hadn’t gotten onto the incident with his daughter in Vail. The CIA’s press officer, Ron Hazelwood, was giving his weekly briefing in the ground-floor conference room. At least to this moment he hadn’t sent up the red flag for an instant read on some issue he was being pressed on. It was something he would have done had Vail come up.

  Yemm had recruited someone from Security to do the driving this morning. All the way out, riding shotgun, he spoke in low tones on the encrypted phone. McGarvey didn’t pay much attention; his thoughts were on his beleaguered family. Counting Otto, attempts had been made on all their lives, and it made no more sense to McGarvey now than it had in the beginning.

  What the hell were they after? Every scenario he came up with to bring reason to the facts was filled with holes large enough to drive a truck through.

  Yemm rode with him on the elevator as far as the glass doors to his office suite. He was preoccupied.

  “I’d like a couple minutes of your time sometime today,” he said. “I want to run something by you.”

  “How about right now?” McGarvey asked.

  “I’ve got a couple of things to check out first.”

  McGarvey looked a little closer at Yemm. “Anything urgent I need to know about?”

  “I’m not sure, boss.”

  “Okay,” McGarvey said. “When you’re ready.” He went in, and Ms. Swanfeld jumped up and followed him through to his office.

  “Good morning, Mr. Director,” she said. “How is Mrs. McGarvey?”

  “They’re going to do some tests this morning, so we won’t know anything until she gets through with that.”

  McGarvey handed his coat to her and went to his desk as she hung it up in the closet.

  “She’ll be fine, we’re all certain of it,” Ms. Swanfeld said. She poured McGarvey a cup of coffee as he flipped through the stack of phone messages and memos that had already piled up this morning.

  “Has Dick arrived yet?”

  “Yes, sir. He wants to see you first off.”

  McGarvey looked up. Dahlia Swanfeld was tough. She’d been through her share of crises in her thirty-plus years with the Company. But she was taking this one more personally than most. The CIA was her family.

  “This will pass,” he told her, using Stenzel’s words because he couldn’t think of his own.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. She wanted to ask something else. But she hesitated.

  �
��What is it?” McGarvey prompted.

  “It’s about your daughter and the poor baby,” Ms Swanfeld said. “I was wondering if sending her a little something would be appropriate under the circumstances? Flowers? A sympathy card? A stuffed animal? Something.” She was distraught.

  McGarvey’s heart softened. He smiled. “I think she’d like that very much.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll tell Mr. Adkins that you’re ready for him. And, Mr. Paterson would like to have a word with you this morning before ten. He said that it was extremely urgent.”

  “I’ll call him—”

  “He would like to see you in person.”

  “Okay, ask him to come up now,” McGarvey said. “Then get my son-in-law on the phone. And sometime before lunch Dick Yemm wants to see me. Fit him in please.”

  “Yes, sir. You might want to look through your agenda as soon as possible. I’ll need to know what to cancel.”

  “We’re canceling nothing, Dahlia,” McGarvey said sternly. “Business will continue as usual. For everyone. Do I make myself clear?”

  “We’ll do our best, Mr. Director,” she said, and she left to get started.

  McGarvey sat down and sifted through the stack of memos again, but he couldn’t keep his mind off Liz and the baby. Knowing that she had lost the child was terrible enough for him. But the knowledge that it was a baby girl was something far worse. It wasn’t a shapeless blob growing inside her body. It was a human being who would have grown up to be another Elizabeth, another Kathleen.

  His secretary buzzed him. “Mr. Rudolph from the Bureau is on one. Do you want to take it?”

  “Yes,” McGarvey said. He hit the button for one. “Good morning, Fred. Do you have something for me already?”

  “Not yet. But I need a couple of answers from you. For starters, who are we supposed to be watching at the Russian embassy other than the crowd we normally watch?” Fred Rudolph was the director of the FBI’s Special Investigative Division. He and McGarvey had worked on a couple of sticky situations over the past year or two. They had a mutual respect.

  “Dmitri Runkov, for one,” McGarvey said.

  “The rezident is a tricky man. He’s out in the open most of the time, but he does his little disappearing act every now and then,” Rudolph said. “Drives everyone nuts. Do you think that his shop might have had something to do with your brush in the islands?”